Open Access: Noch keine Patentlösung – DigitalBrainstorming Blog

Google English: "Open Access: No patent solution yet

Swiss universities are paying millions for scientific publications - so the taxpayer is twice asked to pay after having already paid for the research. Open Access is the recipe of Swiss education policy against this misery. Now it turns out: this is not a panacea....

In principle, everyone agrees: research institutions today are forced to spend huge sums on subscriptions to scientific publications - the market volume worldwide is estimated at around 8 billion euros, for Switzerland Swissuniversities expects 70 million francs. The market is dominated by a few very few providers. Their names are Elsevier, Wiley, Springer. The renowned journal Nature, for example, is in the hands of Springer. The publishers have bought almost all the relevant magazines over the last twenty years and that's several thousand. In several cases they have also founded new magazines. These providers are de facto monopolizing and imposing hefty price increases on their customers year after year, which are usually paid. This is at the expense of taxpayers.

The problem has been known for years - for some years now, the principle of Open Access is hoped to have found a remedy against this malady: in the future, scientists are required to publish their research results in an open access journal. There are heaps of such magazines. Open Access has also recently become standard in Swiss education policy: The Swiss National Science Foundation, for example, links the support for its research funding to a publication in an open access journal. Swissuniversities, the umbrella organization of Swiss universities, has Open Access recently launched an official Open Access Policy . It is thus on the official line of EU research policy.

So far so good. However, the implementation does not seem to be anything but easy: In his text published in February 2018 - incidentally published as Open Access - the ETH scientist Michael Hagner has set out in detail the problem. In his article he describes the ideas of Open Access as "narrative", somewhat casually you could translate that with a pious wish.

'Put in the most basic terms: as a business model of academic capitalism, OA is already a reality; as a program for bringing together the human race in intellectual dialogue and a common quest for knowledge, it remains a utopia.'...

 The open access policy as pursued in Switzerland and the EU has led to a number of undesirable side effects. Thus, the number of open access publications has skyrocketed. The reason is simple: with the open access principle, it is no longer readers who pay, but authors. This leads to an inflation of providers, because everyone would like to do business here. In technical jargon one speaks of "predatory publishers" or "pseudo-journals"; The distinction is apparently not always easy for science professionals. On the other hand, the desire for open access publications has not left its mark on major providers such as Elsevier, Springer and Wiley: they too now offer open access models in their magazines. In doing so, the business model is simply reversed: it is no longer the subscribers who have to pay, but the sender, in this case the authors. These are the universities and research institutions. No problem in countries like Switzerland or Germany, where enough money is available. But what, asks Hagner is with countries that do not have the money for it? - Despite well-funded research, it is currently unclear in Switzerland, too, who should pay for the costs of these publications: The authors, the university institutes, the libraries or even the federal government?...

Hagner is also critical of the idea of ​​free access for all: indeed, in the world of open access, everyone has access to research results. Only: Do Mr. and Mrs. Müller really want the last research results in the field of molecular physics, radiology or biochemistry? - Because they already have access today, only they have to make the detour via a public scientific library.

Open access like Michael Hagner probably does not solve the problem. Because the causes are elsewhere: For example, in the publication constraint - some call it also publication delusion - the scientist after the motto "Publish or perish". And behind it is ultimately the conviction that publications serve economic progress and the transfer of knowledge. Also this conviction, so Hagner, it is critical to question. After all, he does not want to spill the child with the bath: "The idea of ​​OA is not to blame for this development, but rather the fact that OA has so quickly and unforeseeably turned into a lucrative business model."...